A Sorry State

 I had just started to admire Kemi Badenoch and the efforts she has made to make the Conservative Party more like the party I have voted for since 1969 when I first joined as a Young Conservative. I first typed 'supported' instead of 'voted for' in the previous sentence then realised that I really did not support them very much during the COVID restriction days nor, especially, in the Woke Years which, in some ways, are still continuing but at least announcements by Kemi have led me to believe that she wishes to undo as much of what went wrong as best she can. I guess I didn't support anyone. Reform sounded as though they were saying what I wanted to hear but I am afraid that I have not been very impressed with Reform of late and one has to ignore Restore, however much they may seem to echo some views I hold. So I had been pleased with the Conservatives efforts - until now.

It seems that they are claiming a lot of credit for the introduction by Labour of restrictions on young people's access to a range of social media. The proposals look dreadful to me and it is particularly annoying and frustrating to see the Conservatives not only backing most of them but also, as I said, claiming that they wouldn't have been introduced if they had not pushed Labour to do so more quickly.

Now one may have doubts about the influence of the Conservative Opposition in Parliament these days and I suspect their support or pressure has made no difference whatsoever. Sir Keir Starmer wishes to be seen doing something which he has been told a good majority of parents want, and to have something to his name after all the bad publicity and general failure of his government that he's had to put up with. The fact remains that the Conservatives are tying themselves to this new policy and my criticism of the government has to apply similarly to the party I was hoping I could continue to support.

This new regulation will just happen - as it appears that the government can introduce the restrictions without having to have a new law passed or even debated in parliament by virtue of very loose drafting of the Online Safety Bill. It is just like all the woke stuff got enabled as legal restrictions largely through interpretation of paragraphs in the various diversity, equality and similar legislation. 

It all says to me that we do not have the degree of brainpower or even common sense that used to be available in Parliament. The chance for a second Chamber to examine and question dubious drafts has also been dramatically diminished by the removal of umpteen peers over the years too. The recent removal of hereditary peers brought about the loss of some good brains and people with no particular axe to grind but who could see where a set of laws being proposed may be flawed or misinterpreted - or, at the very least, ask questions about the intent and impact.

MPs themselves, certainly amongst the new Labour intake, seem generally very dim and poorly educated. There may be a degree or two but that means nothing these days, I'm afraid. I write as someone who failed all but one of his class of Luton University students on the grounds of having received little or no evidence that they had any clue as to what they were talking about and who failed to produce any evidence that their submissions, such as they were, even vaguely met the published criteria for even a basic pass, and yet had to watch the person who completed the documentation put every single student down as 'passed' for several units. His explanation was that the statistics would look very bad for our College where we delivered some units as we had only a few courses at degree level and the numbers of failures would compromise our relationship with the university and may even result in no new courses coming our way with the consequent loss of fees, if not reputation. That is all, however, another story. Suffice it to say that I am not impressed in the slightest these days when I see that anyone has a degree. I actually think decent grades at A level are more difficult to achieve.

So, our government at the moment comprises a great number of erstwhile trade union representatives and hopeful idiots, all, of course, supporting the increasing move to socialism across Britain without really understanding what they're doing. The few passionate and genuine socialists do know exactly what they are doing, as do the increasing number of MPs elected by non-Christian communities which, again, is another story.

To return to what I had intended to write about, we now have a government that is committed to stop any child under 17 accessing a range of social media and it gets even crazier as they also propose that there will be a kind of curfew or restriction on the time that those aged under 18 can access sites and media. This is the same government that wants to allow children aged 16 and 17 to vote but does not believe they can manage their own access to social media.

Yes, there may well be a number of children who have been badly affected by what they read or view on a whole load of websites but that is far beyond just social media. There will be, though, a hugely greater proportion of people in that age group who have the sense not to spend time on sites where the bad stuff is published, who can control where they go and how they use their access to sites generally, how they interact with others where that is a feature and, of course, their parents are the people who should have control over what they do, not government.

These are dark days when we allow a government, of very mixed reputation and ability and knowledge themselves, control the freedom of 16 and 17 year olds and, for that matter, I think it is wrong for a government to control what many people at 14 or 15 see or read. This is all a matter for parents. If they do not like what they see their children accessing then they should step in and make such restrictions as suit the circumstances. And one family will not be the same as another family in this respect. A global ban which impacts what a vulnerable child of limited intelligence can access in the same way as for an intelligent and aware child. Parents will know better than a government what is best for their children. If parents simply hold their hands in the air and say they cannot control what their children do and wish to delegate responsibility for the care of their children to the government then we have reached a sorry state and that makes Britain a sorry State indeed.

Government should get out of our lives, not become ever more involved in controlling us. Ministers really do not know what is best. Ministers, at best, will make decisions which correlate best with their ideal version of a state and, in the current government, that is a socialist one. 

This is all very very bad news as I do not see how it can be reversed if the Conservatives also support the regulations, albeit not the socialist aim.

The social media referred to includes Facebook and YouTube! I am not a great fan of Facebook but it strikes me as a popular place where families and friends share pictures and stories of what they're doing. In the main this seems to be what they're eating or trying to impress as many friends as they can with their appearance or latest acquisition or location. I find it pretty tedious nowadays. It seemed an improvement on Friends Reunited in the early 2000s as I recall and, by virtue of the sheer volume of information that was being collected every day across the planet by its huge number of participants, I remember how we were encouraged to promote Facebook as a learning tool in classrooms. The search facility would produce often quite interesting results about a place, for instance, that a normal Ask Jeeves or Yahoo enquiry might miss.

YouTube has become the default place many people go for news these days and newscasts like Ukraine:The Latest or Jacob Rees-Mogg's summaries of the day and several other videos are all that I may see in some evenings. OK, I don't expect young children to enjoy these particular items but this is where many will get their music and even films nowadays. It is also one of the few places where many of us can upload a movie that we have made to share with others or feature on a website. YouTube makes this sort of thing easy. Children at 14 or 15 love making videos and YouTube is a place they can share them. There are others like TikTok that I don't like but I would not ban children from seeing the vast majority of its content. yes, there will be a lot of bad stuff but then anyone scrolling through the channels available on a modern TV will find stuff just as bad and there will be websites galore which friends will tell them about where there will be no restrictions to stop them viewing stuff anyway. What the government prevent them seeing on a few social media sites will very quickly be available somewhere else and we'll be driving many children to worse, much more dodgy places and to do so without telling anyone. 

Parents need to wake up to what their children are looking at. It is parents who need to do all the work in controlling and explaining why they may place blocks on some places. Children used to look at naughty magazines and read pages from books that might be full of activities, explained in detail even parents might be embarrassed to read. Now they look at pictures and videos online. I suspect that the newer stuff is more shocking and debauched but I am afraid we have to accept that they'll see stuff we'd prefer they didn't. Banning them from a few social media accounts will not make any difference. 

Chrome has 'incognito' windows where your location may be hidden and allows adults to pop into sites they would prefer their partners weren't aware of. The facility to disguise who and where you are is vital to anyone in Russia who wishes to read about what is happening in the real world. Not that they still can get very far into that real world but, at least, the virtual private network, as the software is termed, keeps them a little safer from the gaze of their socialist masters. It will become all the more used here and parents may be none the wiser. at least, as things stand, they have some chance of checking where their children have been online but soon this history will be removed by more and more children as they learn how to.

Overall, there is nothing that I can find that is at all good about the new regulations. A dreadful move by a dreadful government and supported by a party I was thinking I might like to vote for again. Now I have no clue what to do at the next election. I will do my best to urge the Conservatives to water down as much of these regulations as possible but fear they will want to retain the social media bans for under 16s. The curfew for 16 and 17 year olds must go, though. I'll accept, I suppose, a commitment to look again at controls should they ever be in a position to change anything and all I can hope is that children make such fools of the government that the ban in its present form is proven impractical if not nonsensical.

What a farce. How little influence do many parents seem to possess these days.

Watching TV and doing nothing.

 I used to watch TV series, sometimes several a week. Although I could record them to watch later, most weeks I would want to watch 'live', to be one of the first to see how a story was developing or, in the case of X Factor or American Idol, to get my reviews and predictions published as early as possible so that I could not be accused of copying what someone else had said. When Lost was in full flight it was, for me, simply an hour that I had to see. That was easy for the first series, maybe a few more, which were broadcast on a channel in the UK called Sky One. You didn't need a satellite dish or a subscription to Sky in order to watch Sky One; it was one of the channels that appeared in a nice long list which you got with something called Freeview on most TVs in the 2000s. Later, however, around 2006 or 7 as I recall, it changed and I was unable to watch Lost on any of my available channels. I needed this fix quite badly, though, being very much addicted to the series and I would write regularly about it and read avidly the reviews each week and the many long and carefully argued dissemination of what may or may not be happening as people like me tried to get into the minds of the writers and make sense of the many twists and turns and small hints and possible Easter eggs each edition presented. To satiate my desperate need I managed to find some recordings that had been uploaded by fans and, through something called P2P software, I was able to watch these. Sometimes the video was a small rectangle surrounded by advertisements in what I presume were Chinese but, over the years, these improved and, although I cannot now remember how, for the last series or two I was able to watch pretty much as I had started on some Freeview channel or watch a recording of an American broadcast a few hours after it had finished. TV tended to rule my evenings, with something entertaining or intellectually challenging appearing live, or as a recording of something only recently aired, available every day.

Now I can watch almost anything I want, whenever I want. But none of it is live. Except Eurovision, I suppose, or the occasional sports event where the play is not worth watching if you have already seen the result. And what do I now watch? News. Some nights that is actually all I watch. Ukraine: The Latest is my first go-to programme in the week, often followed by Jacob Rees-Mogg's remarkably good summaries of some point of interest or debate in the news at the time and then YouTube will offer me the very watchable Madeleine Grant on Quite Right! and a couple of Telegraph journalists dissecting the news of the political day. I would never have imagined, a few years ago, that I would watch YouTube every evening.

With Netflix, Amazon Prime and, of course BBC iPlayer, there is a further abundance of films and series old and new that I could watch but I seldom seem to get round to more than Clarkson's Farm these days. That is mainly due to the news itself being so interesting.

Here in the UK I can only watch the country slide deeper and deeper into debt and, whilst attempting to put a brave face to the outside world, looking increasingly pathetic to anyone who looks closely. I don't think there is anything that the present government has done with which I can agree. So much of the new regulations seem pointless or just a way to tax some people more and make life more difficult for business. So it can be a bit depressing watching the UK news - maybe frustrating is a better word as I tend not to get depressed - but it does make me consider how it might develop. We have Reform who, until recently were surging in the polls and who have, indeed, taken over a lot of local government. It is too early to tell but I am not sure we will see the sort of big changes that they promised. The new councillors will no doubt be discovering that, much as they would like to change this or that, past commitments bind them and 99% of the funds available to them are already committed to one project or another.

I have mentioned before the Makerfield by-Election where Andy Burnham now looks a certain winner. Reform may see quite a drop in support and It will be fascinating to see how that wanes across the next few years. Conservatives may well benefit from that but I can't see them being sufficiently forgiven or attractive as an option for old Labour voters and we will have the most God-awful mess of a result in 2029 or whenever. Watching the demise of Labour, the insecurity of Reform, the preposterousness of the Greens and the serious efforts of the Conservatives to maintain some relevance is quite entertaining at times.

Abroad is almost exciting when I look at Ukraine. Whilst the horrors of civilians very young and very old being killed by Russian strikes every day are dreadful, for every few Ukraine innocents lost it seems that 1000 or more Russian troops are lost. This has been going on for some time now and estimates from reliable sources indicate that about 1,300,000 Russian soldiers have been lost in this war. That is an extraordinary number. I can only assume that the Russian people are not aware of this number or consider it some Western propaganda of some sort. They may become more aware soon as Putin may have to resort to compulsory military service for more young people in Russia in order to maintain troop numbers. If he were to announce this then I think there would be a flight from the country by large numbers of young men and women and this could lead to the lid being blown off the can of secrets that have so far been kept fairly well hidden from the majority. Much as I believe Russians going about their normal day will want to support their home nation, and respect their government and leaders, seeing more of the real facts of the last 4 years or more, realising just how badly their troops have acted in their name, how pointless has been the destruction of so many towns and villages, and areas of production when the dam was destroyed, flooding a huge area of Kherson, not to mention the rape and torture of villagers in places like Bucha and the terrible abduction of what could be 20,000 or more children, seeing all this will have an impact. 

That impact may not be immediate. No-one likes to be told that their leaders are evil, or that really bad things have been done in your nation's name, that most of what you have been told in the media, TV and newspapers, has been lies. It can't be easy to realise that you have been fooled for all this time. No-one wants to admit or acknowledge that but, eventually, as conversations start then there will be areal rise in concern amongst the public. Whether that can lead to any actual change in policy at the top is another matter. Much will depend upon how the police control what people talk about and how loudly they can speak. While someone can be arrested and jailed for speaking out against propaganda, never mind actual government policy, normal people will keep quiet in the streets. Behind the scenes I can imagine discussions but it would take very brave people to make any significant noise. That feeling of uncertainty, guilt even, will spread, though, and eat into that determination that, whatever anyone else says, Russia must be right. Even the vague suggestion that Russia may be wrong, though, could be enough to sow the seeds of doubt into the minds of people who might be able to make a change. The police, the security brigades, business leaders, maybe even some government people, might already have some doubts sometimes but will increasingly begin to see that what they have believed all these years is mostly wrong. That has to lead to some change. 

I worry that some reaction may be violent. If you push someone into a corner they may not just subside into a help and plead for forgiveness. They will, as often or not, lash out and, in some kind of all-or-nothing attempt to get out of the situation, cause even more damage to those around them than they had done before.

So these will be difficult times in Russia. Every Ukraine missile that lands on another oil refinery, military weapons factory or similar carefully-chosen target will carry the message that there is, indeed, a war and that Russia is not winning that war. Up until recently, most Russians could live their lives blissfully unaware that they were themselves in any danger and that anything very bad was being done by forces in their name. They may have wondered why the internet dropped out so much, why some products are scarce and why inflation is increasing but I suppose that's not much different to life in some other places from time to time. Now many must have noticed, or they soon will be very much aware, that, although, unlike Russia, Ukraine is not aiming any missiles at civilians, not every missile lands where it was intended and there will be an apartment block that descends to a pile of rubble one day, or a volcano will appear to have erupted in the High Steet of your local town. That will be difficult to ignore and difficult for the talking heads on your TV to explain.

So all the news about what is happening as I write is fascinating. I worry about predicting anything as to where this all leads. Ukraine will not agree to give away any territory. Putin will not admit that he cannot get more. He has really only one option and that is to get more and more violent. I fear, therefore, that we shall see the firing of the nasty missiles that do seem able to get through Ukraine's defences and that some of these may land on blocks, killing hundreds. It will be inexcusable. Other nations will cry foul. But no-one will do anything. Only Ukraine will act and, sooner or later, they will, either by mistake or in understandable lack of restraint, hit a significant part of a significant city in Russia that Putin has to respond to by going nuclear.

What a disaster that day will be as we watch the mushroom cloud over a city somewhere in Ukraine, and read that 250,000 people were killed instantly.

And still, unbelievably, we will do nothing.

Amateur Reform and Sleep-walking into Socialism

 Much as I agree with many of the policies as promoted for the Reform Party, I am concerned at the views and apparent lack of sense by some of the people being put up for election. The latest character, Robert Kenyon, standing in the Makerfield by-election, appears to be rather a bad choice.

Firstly, he may claim that he voted for Brexit but all the evidence of his reaction to the declaration of our referendum result and posts of social media around that time contradicts that claim. Naturally, no-one will ever know where he put his cross on the day but my bet is that he was not a great supporter of the UK leaving. That, in itself, is not such a big deal and I can see many people are a bit disillusioned with how things have been negotiated since but my main concern is just how silly his tweets or comments have been. They seem no better than some bloke of limited intelligence having a rant after a couple of beers in the pub. Indeed, I am not sure I would want the type of person who feels he has to comment in that way to other people's messages or posts. His language and attitude lack any class and, looking at how he has behaved and the other things he seems to have supported or shared with a thumbs-up emoji, which in itself, tells us a lot about his lack of grey matter and ability to communicate in society, tend to make me rather unenthusiastic about having him as a Member of Parliament and getting £75000 or so from out taxes plus a massive pay-off and great pension when he gets kicked out a some point in years to come.

The final straw, and something which now has made me think again about supporting Reform, has been his comments about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He seems to think that Russia were 'within their rights' to invade Crimea in 2014. I see no comment from him criticising Russia since either. Even if we accept that Crimea has had a fraught history and no-one outside Ukraine seemed to put up much resistance to Russia at the time I fail to see any argument that supports invasion.

Reform also seem to be quiet on most matters concerning Russian activities, reflecting largely the extraordinary silence recently from anyone in the States with any degree of influence on the war in Ukraine. One has to wonder where their policies would lead if elected. I fear that, much like Trump, Farage would not wish to spend any money on further support and would just hope that it all goes away in time. Frankly, a Reform government would have an extraordinary amount of work on its plate anyway with no obvious plan as to how they would implement the changes and so foreign policy generally is likely to take a back seat.

I watched the Makerfield candidate on Question Time yesterday evening and had to smile at just how pathetic all the candidates came across. It was like watching a cartoon. 

The Liberal Democrat made almost no impact whatsoever and the only thing I can now recall, apart from his slightly odd appearance and his not really suiting a moustache, was the mention of his husband for no apparent reason other than perhaps to get the vote of a young chap in the audience wearing a remarkably pink and fancy shirt.

The Conservative had an almost permanent smile. An older chap who spoke a lot of sense but seemed quite out of place and was more ignored by the audience, and Fiona Bruce, than even the Liberal bloke. There was not, it seemed, a single Conservative supporter in the audience anyway and I think he and Fiona realised that.

The Green lady smiled even more than the Conservative but hers was one of those smiles that comes either just before or just after they make a sarcastic remark or are convinced that they know best whatever the other person says. She seemed only concerned in getting the Reform bloke to talk about what he had or hadn't said many years ago about what he might like to do to Carol Voderman's bottom. No-one in the audience, or the panel for that matter, questioned the Green Party's policy on not having any border controls, allowing people to use drugs and supporting Hamas or Hezbollah, probably both, as well as maintaining a list of all the jews in Britain. You do have to wonder what has happened to the Green Party. They used to be concerned about whales and the countryside. Now it's Gaza and, er, Gaza.

Andy Burnham was the Labour candidate and, of course, his sole job was to get through the evening without slipping up so that he could win the by-election and take over as Britain's Prime Minister. He managed that reasonably well, although you got the impression that he didn't have any solutions for any of the problems that the government has got itself into and, in the end, is unlikely to make Britain any better place at all. Indeed, by being somewhat more electable at a future General Election than any of the other obvious candidates, Britain could become considerably worse in the longer term if he were able to keep Reform or the Conservatives out of power for a further five years.

To get back to the Reform candidate, I had, at least, expected him to be able to present himself well, with some passion and good old Reform banter and protestations and instant, one-line recipes for fixing things. Instead we saw him floundering and way out of his depth, woefully unprepared and definitely not someone we would want to be running any department in the country. According to the polls before the show, Reform were running Labour a close second and, had someone called the Restore Party not being standing, they might have stood a chance of winning the seat. After the show Labour were 10 points ahead and I fear for the worst.

Unimpressive as Reform looked that night, I see their victory as the only way to avoid a long-term socialist destruction of all that I care for in Britain over the years ahead. I don't like all their policies and the candidate is rubbish but they are the only party with any chance of beating Labour at this time. I would vote Reform in Makerfield and would encourage anyone who does live there to do so.

Let us hope that the next General Election is some time away so that Kemi Badenoch can continue to impress people and regain the trust of so many Conservative voters who turned away from the party in 2024. I believe Reform have now peaked and, as we see more of their rather poor candidates on TV, I predict that their vote share will diminish with that of the Conservatives growing once more. It may well be that we have an even split across the parties as I think the ridiculous Greens will steal votes from Labour and the Lib Dems so we could even be looking at 20-20-20-15-15-5, the 15s being for the Greens and Lib Dems and the 5 for the usual rag-bag of Independents, Monster Raving Loonies and Islamic State supporters etc.

Whatever else one may conclude from that, one thing is certain, much as big change is necessary, it ain't about to happen as no combination of parties would have enough authority to do much more than collect taxes and talk a lot.

The trouble is that unless the Conservatives and Reform can start to work together and demonstrate that they have learned lessons from their previous failure, in the case of the former, and that they have solid and well-researched policies for fixing Britain, in the case of the latter, then the public will remain largely unimpressed by anyone and we will find ourselves sleep-walking into Socialism.

Perception rules

 I have written much in the past about how ridiculous attention to Diversity, Equality and Inclusion matters has developed over the years, with HR departments and leagues of new 'staff development' trainers delivering instructions to organisations across the country, mostly large and influential but also small and vulnerable, to the extent that most of us are scared to say or write anything relating to anything that might be considered a 'protected' minority characteristic. 

I have always blamed this intrusion into common sense left, right and centre on the last Conservative government's lax attitude and simply not spotting what was going on under their noses. I never thought they actively condoned or supported the changes happening but I did believe that they were very wrong in just letting it happen.

Now, thanks to an excellent article by Charles Moore in The Telegraph, I realise that the seeds of the racial element of much of this were sown far earlier, in 1999, when we were governed by Blair's Labour government. I reproduce most of the article here as it sets out so well how things went wrong.

When enormous official reports about terrible wrongs appear, most of those commenting on them do not have time to read them in full. The story breaks and everyone wants a quick reaction. This usually guarantees favourable reporting: much safer to praise than to interrogate.

In 1999, I was busy editing this newspaper, but I decided to take time out to read and analyse the whole of Macpherson. Something about the clamour surrounding it, and the mob intimidation from the public gallery in Lambeth Town Hall of witnesses to the inquiry, had made me suspicious.

Two things struck me about the report. The first was its tone. From the start, it was accusatory and rhetorical, not measured and professional. It assailed the character of police officers who appeared before it, like a prosecution, not an official inquiry. Its interpretation of events seemed settled in advance, whereas a well-conducted inquiry takes evidence on which to form its interpretation. Officers who dissented from the Macpherson view were exhibiting “their own unwitting collective racism”, it said. Hence, his concept of “institutional racism”. 

It seemed to me that the report never proved this. It simply asserted it.

The second point arose from the first. If the police, as the report said, were “unwitting” in their collective racism, it followed that self-selecting enlightened people – such as Sir William Macpherson, then in his 70s and living in a castle in non-diverse Perthshire – should order their re-education.

Thus the subject of racism gained the special privilege of not being defined by the criminal law in the ordinary way. A new, non-legal principle was invented and imposed. “A racist incident,” said Macpherson’s famous conclusions, “is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.”

So anyone who thought he or she had suffered a racist incident had indeed done so, no further evidence required. And since even declared non-victims could, by “perceiving” a racist incident, make it exist, you needed only one person to perceive a racist incident, and report it, to make it an event which must be officially recorded. What was the criminal law, whose job is to establish guilt or innocence, supposed to make of that?

“If this definition were to be accepted,” I wrote in this space at the time, “the statistics of racist incidents would suddenly shoot up, allowing the police to be attacked even more.” That is exactly what has happened.

Macpherson added something else: “The term ‘racist incident’ must be understood to include crimes and non-crimes. Both must be reported, recorded and investigated with equal commitment” (“24 hours a day”). That, too, is exactly what has happened, the official name for this extra branch of police work being “non-crime hate incidents”.

Finally, Macpherson recommended that his racist incident definition “should be universally adopted by the police, local government and other relevant agencies.” That has also happened. We are governed by Macpherson race theory.

Sir William, I wrote then, “imposes on his victims, the police, a concept of racism which makes them guilty whatever they do… It is contemptible that someone versed in [the English] law should have done such a thing.” By doing so, he would “inflame racial feeling.”

Today, the flames are crackling. They may even succeed in burning down our entire party system.

One of the “nine principles” of our police, deriving from Sir Robert Peel, who founded them, is that “The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions.” The Macpherson legacy is quite different. It is to make the police – and many other public employees – the agents of a race doctrine they have been told they themselves do not understand.

The same doctrine teaches that, if they are white, they will never understand it. So now poor police officers run around gabbling half-digested jargon about identity and disable the native capacity of their own eyes and ears, even when someone is dying in front of them. How could such a police force ever win public approval? That is why, as Kemi Badenoch recently put it, we are “descending into tribalism”.

It is race, obviously, that makes this discussion so tense. But I think the problem runs wider and deeper. It is an irrationality of which racism itself is the worst but not the only symptom. After Macpherson, the British state decided to allow “perception” to trump the law’s traditional emphasis on provable fact. That irrationality has opened up other ones – such as the assertion that gender is a matter of choice not of biology, or the doctrine, in relation to sexual assaults, that “The victim must always be believed”, which has led to a slew of false, life-ruining accusations of child sexual abuse.

Racism remains a real and present evil, so the unpicking of the Macpherson legacy must be calmly conducted, but unpicked it must be.

It seems worth ending with one further point. In Britain today, by far the most virulent form of racism is anti-Semitism. A serious attempt is being made to drive out Jews, arguably the most well-integrated of all immigrant groups. And where have our post-Macpherson, “anti-racist” police been in all this? Just standing and watching as the Jew-haters march down the street.

Finally, after the publicity surrounding the attack on Henry Nowak, people are realising that the police have been acting as they have been trained to do and it is that training that needs to be changed - and quickly. That will not be easy. Many officers and legal minds have grown up over 25 or more years believing this concept of 'perceiving' a racist incident. It will take a long time to reverse much of teh arguments made before and, no doubt, there will plenty of push-back by those who wanted and made the instructions in the first place. No-one likes to admit they were wrong.

There is a long way to go before British society and legislation returns to the wonderfully simple elements of common sense and freedom of speech and thought that we were once well-known for. Some movement has taken place on trans matters with our Supreme Court declaring that you are either a man or a woman and you cannot change your biological sex. You may be free to dress or act as your please but remain as your were born and will be treated under the law as such. Anyone can choose to be a transvestite or announce that they feel most comfortable at any point they choose along some spectrum of gender from male to female and it is right that we respect their views in day-to-day life. We should not, however, be fired or arrested for asserting that a man is a man and should not be using a woman's toilet or changing room, or for referring to him as her and declining to engage with weird new pronouns like ze or expected to use they in contradiction of the grammar we have learned.

There is a long way to go but, at least, it appears we may have made a start.